How It Has Come To This
by Satellite Falling
Summary: Bella, Charlie, Billy, Edward and Sam cannot understand how it has come to this. But Leah does. A 'Team Jacob' approach


Bella doesn't understand how it has come to this.

The thought comes to her while taking out the trash. In some odd way, she has always measured the passing of weeks by garbage and recycling. Renee never paid attention to unpleasant household tasks, so it always fell to Bella. As she grew older, she would wonder, _Where has another week gone? Didn't I just put out the garbage yesterday? _She felt like an old woman thinking such things but she thought them just the same as she sorted out the cans, newspaper and plastic. There was some odd comfort to the task—she was banishing the house of clutter, yet also saving a little piece of the earth. Though not as enjoyable as cooking, she did find satisfaction in her duty and took over the chore when she moved to Charlie's.

It is twilight. Her eyes are becoming accustomed to the waning light as she sorts. _Cans cans cans paper plastic paper paper plastic cans_. Hauling the last load to the curb, it occurs to her that this will be the last time she will do this chore. Not only the last time in this house, but probably the last time ever. What could vampires possibly have to recycle, to throw away? There may be the odd accumulation of paper, or some garbage after Esme refinishes another room. There would probably be some debris after a 'game' gone wrong between two brothers, their play taking a toll on a piece of home décor that was not meant to withstand two walls slamming into it during an impromptu wrestling match.

_What will mark the days, the weeks?_ Bella begins to see that there will be little need to measure time anymore. Though there are clocks and calendars throughout the Cullen house, they are merely markers of human time. Carlisle uses them to tell him when to go to work and they may need them one day when they return to school, years from now. But there will no longer be any routine or rituals to bind her to a humanity she thought she didn't want.

It takes Bella half an hour to make it back to the front door from the curb as she begins to measure time in breaths.

* * *

Charlie doesn't understand how it has come to this.

Charlie knows that Bella is taking out the garbage, sorting the recycling. She has always done this and he is not one to complain about relinquishing a chore he only did out of necessity. It feels like she has been gone for a long time, but he is so immersed in the game that he can't say for sure how long she has been outside. But he knows for a fact that she returns between the 5th and 6th innings. He knows this because time stops when he looks up, her face dragging him back into a reality he has tried so very hard to forget.

It wasn't a year ago yet that he thought he'd lost her. Yet this isn't the same catatonic look that had masked her face for a week after Edward had left. Nor is it the empty and painful look of forced living she had tortured herself with for months after that. This look is almost nineteen years old. It is the look on Renee's face when she had realized that there was more life to live than the one she had been living. It is the same look that still comes to Charlie in his sleeping hours. It always ends the same way, Renee driving away with an infant Bella, Charlie rooted to the spot, unsure of what to do.

This is a look that Charlie knows well, and, at long last, he knows how he can act on it.

* * *

Billy doesn't understand how it has come to this.

How could Charlie have the nerve to call and ask him? How dare he throw their friendship in his face, proclaiming that the happiness of his daughter rested on his shoulders now. Has he no idea of the havoc that girl has wreaked on his son or the community by the choices she's made?

Billy knows that there is no real way for Charlie to know these things. He knows that Charlie is grasping at straws himself, twisted by the fear of losing the last thing that matters to him. He couldn't grasp how close he is to really losing her forever but maybe, on some level, he did.

Billy has a hard time these days understanding love. He doesn't remember it being so complicated, so fraught with strife. He could recall, with some difficulty, being young once. Young and foolish. How those two go hand and hand. And he had daughters. He knew how fickle the heart could be. Truth be told, he was relieved when they had moved away before they were in any real relationships. He wasn't sure he could go through the teenage female angst. Yet Jacob had more than made up for what he missed with his daughters. Moody, tortured, carrying around a love unrequited. So very much in love and, now, so far away from home.

Bella had left Jacob broken. She'd left him broken from a fight with the vampires, yet Billy knew that he would heal. She'd left him broken by a choice, and Billy wasn't sure that Jacob could come back from it. But the pleading in Charlie's voice mirrors his own silent pleading to a son who has run far from home to keep from being found.

Billy decides that, for both of them, he is going to try.

* * *

Sam doesn't understand how it has come to this.

The images still come to him, taunting and haunting him. He lifts a crumpled figure from the ground but she fights him and runs away further into the dark, past the boundary of where Sam is permitted to go. She walks the line silently, back and forth, back and forth, a shell of who she used to be. Sam begs her to come to him, promising to take her away from this, to protect her. She merely shrugs and fades back into the night, ochre eyes hovering in the blackness until they disappear, a new moon and shrouded skies removing all traces of light from the abyss.

He had saved Bella that night, yet she chose to go back. They fought for her, one of their own wounded, yet still she chose them. Sam couldn't understand it and refused to try. Couldn't she see wrath that the simple presence of the Cullens had brought to their tribe? He and nine others were ripped from the safety and the joy of their ordinary lives and forced into the role of protectors for who knows how long. _The rest of our lives, no doubt_ he screams inwardly. Bella had chosen to recede into the night with the very monsters that now plagued Sam's waking and unwaking thoughts.

He doesn't realize until it is too late that the order he gives to the pack will be too vague.

* * *

Edward doesn't understand how it has come to this.

Alice is sitting on the couch, her trance-like state striking her curiously quiet. It isn't the absence of words that breaks Edward's concentration, but his inability to see anything in her mind. There is no indication of what she is seeing or thinking—no images, no fleeting words, no faces swirling around. There is only nothingness.

_Odd_, he thinks. It doesn't have the same feel as her trying to prevent him from reading her mind as she had so often lately, trying to keep a few wedding details a surprise. She usually covered these thoughts with annoying songs and translations of obscure literature into equally as obscure languages. This is unsettlingly different.

He can tell from her posture, her expression that she is trying to 'see' the future. He is unable to tell whose future she is trying to read. Edward racks his mind for an explanation of the white silence of his sister's thoughts. As the reason slowly creeps into Edward consciousness, he quickly tries to banish it. He tries to find some other justification, come to any other conclusion. He wants to erase all traces of the thought from his mind, wants to go back five minutes in time to the moment he still had a future.

A small, sad cry from Alice as she emerges from vision of a future that doesn't include him makes Edward realize that there is no going back.

* * *

Leah understands how it has come to this.

Leah understands what it is like to be hopelessly in love with someone you know you can't have. She has allowed her grief over the loss of Sam to petrify and settle in jagged layers. She has tried to chip it away, smooth the edges, but every day that she watches Sam look at Emily or catches fleeting thoughts of her in their collective mind, it only adds another layer and Leah is getting tired of paring it away. No, she cannot fault Jacob—no matter how much she may chide him for his constant stream of thoughts on Bella. Leah and Jacob are in the same boat, and it seems to be sinking.

Leah understands what Edward will go through. Having lived it already, she knows what he will think, how the heartache will feel, the denial. If circumstances were different, if he and she were different people, she would go to Edward. She would try to comfort him, though she knows there is little comfort to be had. He, at least, has the option of leaving this town and never coming back, never needing to look back. He is not bound to this small speck of Earth by duty. She hopes that he may find happiness again somewhere. He can search the earth to find it. Leah is on a short leash trying to find hers.

Most surprisingly of all, Leah best understands Bella. She is angry with her for hurting a 'brother', for choosing the Cullens over them, for having to go to war for her. All of these feelings aside, Leah has no choice but to understand her. She has heard the residue of Jacob's conversations with Bella and the conversations Seth overheard before the fight. Bella needs Edward. Leah doesn't know how the pack cannot grasp the idea—it mimics the idea of imprinting.

Imprinting is like an undertow. You're standing solidly, sure of everything when it comes along and pulls you under. No matter how you try to fight it, it will pull you down and take you with it. You are swept into a sea of longing and eventually and you have no will to rise. You grow gills and learn to breathe underwater. You might even forget what the air above the water is like.

Bella will always need Edward in a way, their connection unbreakable. But Bella will be able to compartmentalize this need. She'll be able to box it up and sink it beneath the current. She'll do this because she finally recognizes how bound she is to this place—to her friends, her family, her life. She's bound by a love that is rooted in the things she cares for most, a love born of friendship and tied to the real world.

From her vantage point, Leah can see that Bella has broken the surface and has begun the long swim back, hoping like hell that Jacob will be standing on the shore waiting for her. Leah silently encourages from the sidelines because she knows that, no matter who fate determines she should be with, no matter who she imprints on, Leah would use every last breath to swim against that current if she knew Sam would be on the shore waiting for her.

Leah books a flight to bring Jacob home to the beach.


End file.
